.
Sigh. It’s been a long weekend. Since becoming a “full-time” freelance writer, I’d almost forgotten until this weekend what it’s like to be on a work schedule, have to go out and put in 8 or more consecutive hours somewhere. I generally put in more than that a day with my writing, but being on a flexible schedule means it’s usually more broken up and interrupted a lot more often by the silly distractions that come so easily around the house. But it’s been both tiring, rejuvenating and a bit of fun to get out and do a few solid days of real work again.
Archie and I both worked, full disclosure, indirectly for Sony PlayStation this weekend at the Alli Dew Tour at Soldier Field in Chicago. It doesn’t mean we’re fan boys, and it doesn’t mean we’ll be giving preferential treatment to Sony’s games or hardware. We’ll still always provide honest opinions on games, and keep an objective view of what we do. It just means we needed some extra cash, and got hired by a marketing agency that handles Sony’s event marketing in Chicago, which for us meant standing inside and outside of a Sony tent, getting a chance to get our hands on PlayStation Move and talking to people about it, helping them play and learn more about it.
Archie and I actually met a few years back doing this for the same company at Lollapalooza. It’s a fun gig we were recruited for from before our journalism days because we were part of the PlayStation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel. They pick us because we know our stuff when it comes to gaming, and I personally love doing it because it’s a chance to meet great new people with similar interests, and essentially get paid decent wages to play video games with people, try out new things and put in a little manual labor at the end of the day breaking things down and packing it all up for the next city.
Besides getting a pretty wicked sunburn Saturday after standing in the sun for 7 hours or so, I got a chance to play builds of the upcoming Sports Champions and The Shoot for PlayStation Move, which hits September 19 in a variety of packages. People stopping in the tent generally seemed to dig it all, and I think that has to do a lot with the fact that we ushered in a lot of families and probably many casual gamers.
Personally, I like the collection of games comprising Sports Champions – Disc Golf, Gladiator Duel, Archery, Beach Vollyball, Bocce Ball and Table Tennis. They all seem a little more advanced than their Wii Sports counterparts, catered to the slightly different experience Sony is trying to offer with Move. Tossing a Frisbee in Disc golf feels pretty darn accurate, and takes into consideration how straight the disc is thrown. The same goes for the release point of Bocce Ball. And Archery’s use of two controllers to grab from the quill, load and shoot is a lot of fun.
.
But the Gladiator Duel still seems like a lot of directional slashing and little else, despite its supposed 1-to-1 control with Move. Table Tennis bests Tennis on Wii Sports, with better control and spin possibilities to help paint the line. But Beach Vollyball, from admittedly the little chance I had to try it, feels dumb. Ultimately, while Move was a lot of fun to play around with, and seems to have better control than Wii software released a few years ago at this point, I don’t see the lasting appeal. Like Wii Sports, I suspect when many people pick up a Move package with this game, their house will become the gathering place for the novelty for a few months, and then it will never be touched again.
More disappointing, though, was the incomplete build of The Shoot. It’s a rail shooter with a decently comic-book art style, in which players blast the hell out of robots. It controlled as well as a rail shooter can, but it’s a game I wouldn’t pay more than $5 for as a digital title, and definitely would waste time on at retail. As a tech demo, it was fun to have at the booth, but again, the lasting appeal just isn’t there. And that’s the biggest shame for Move right now; there seems to be no “killer app” to win over the hardcore gamer. Everything seems like a lot of what I’ve already seen from and long-since become unenthused with on Wii. The tech could be fun, but it will need better games to survive in the long run.
So that was the long and opinionated short of my weekend. Now it’s time to finally get things kicking again with the site. I planned for last week to be packed with great content for the site, and the beginning definitely was. But getting the weekend job prevented me from totally following through to the end on that. All that means is this week we’ll have a lot more sweet content to post. So, thanks for continuing to read. Go see Inception. That is all.
Dew Tour photo by Thomas Braaksma.
Print This Post